It is an undeniable fact that cloud computing has underpinned the world’s economy, remote workforces, and global supply chains during the Covid19 pandemic. Eventually, it has become an essential target for organizations that are looking for increased scalability, cost efficiency, and business continuity in the coming years. One of the main reasons behind it is simply ‘getting to the cloud’ doesn’t automatically ensure improved performance. Instead, you can use the cloud as an iterative process of optimization and create security by design. This ultimately helps to match a company’s goals, both for the moment now and in the long term.”

Let’s look at some of the cloud computing trends which are expected to take shape in 2021 and upcoming years.

Trend#1 Multi-cloud approach will take the lead

In practice, there is an increasing trend to use hybrid or multi-cloud environments (see below), that enable requirements for infrastructure to be deployed across multiple models. This means there are growing trends among the big providers to create bridges between their cloud platforms. This is a more collaborative approach and adopting it means enabling customers to take more advantage of multi-cloud features. This will also benefit organizations to share data and provide access with partners in their supply chain. This could be working across diverse data standards and applications. This is also a growing space of innovation for startups that simplifies the operational process of different public cloud platforms.

Related post – Is Multi-cloud the future in cloud computing?

Trend #2 AI will enhance the speed and efficiency of cloud computing

As per Gartner “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021” report, a strong artificial intelligence (AI) engineering strategy is required to ensure the success of AI projects. AI projects often fail due to maintainability, scalability, and governance issues. On the contrary, a strong AI engineering strategy helps to ensure the performance, interpretability, scalability, and reliability of AI models while delivering the full value of AI investments. In the context of cloud technology, AI is a key enabler of several ways. Along with that, we can expect technology to adapt to our needs throughout the upcoming years with it. Cloud as-a-service enables users on any budget and with any level of skill to access machine learning functions such as language processing, image recognition tools, and recommendation engines. Cloud will continuously allow these revolutionary tools to become more widely deployed by enterprises of all sizes and in all fields. Hence, it will lead to increased productivity and efficiency. 

Cloud has been used as a delivery medium in almost all segmentation of AI  viz. autonomous vehicles, smart city infrastructure, and pandemic response planning. Also, machine learning plays a significant role in the logistics processes to keep cloud data centers up and running. More research and development in this field are likely to continue to lead to new breakthroughs in data center speed and efficiency.

Trend#3 Serverless approach

One of the game-changing cloud computing execution models which have gained a lot of recent attention in the technology world and could be the future of cloud computing is Serverless computing. No, it does not mean there is no server involved in the architecture; instead, it is an architecture that offers an abstraction of infrastructure, operating systems, and servers to the developers or service consumers.

In a Serverless architecture, you don’t need to think about server management, and it’s all vendor’s responsibility. No doubt, from the data center to Serverless computing –it is a great evolutionary move in the cloud arena.

To explain more, Serverless computing is a cloud execution model in which a cloud provider dynamically allocates compute resources and storage for a particular piece of code and then charges the user for it. Hence, it is not like there is no server included in the whole process, but their provisioning and maintenance burden is not on the user and is entirely taken care of by the provider.

Furthermore, this is an event-driven design and development paradigm which means the code is invoked when there is a request triggered for it. Also, users only pay for the services they are using instead of paying a flat monthly fee. No cost is associated here with downtime or idle time. Here server is not eliminated but resource considerations are moved into the background as per the design process.

Adopting Serverless architecture is indeed beneficial in many ways, but its implementation strategy could be different and challenging in its own ways based on the use cases. For example, Serverless computing is a good solution if you have a limited number of resources. But if you have a complex application, you need to architect the system appropriately to make serverless useful for the function.

No surprise that, like all other new technologies, it will evolve gradually and meet the enterprises’ goal as a solution soon!

It will work as a boon for the developers.

Trend#4 Edge is the new cloud

According to Forrester’s predictions edge is the new cloud, and new edge vendors will trim some points from public cloud growth next year. “In 2021, we will see new business models emerge that facilitate the deployment of edge, efforts by cloud platforms to compete, and AI and 5G facilitating the expansion of edge use cases,” Forrester said.

Over the next few years, it is expected that edge computing will expand rapidly with the skyrocketing use of IoT devices, Mobile computing, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, etc. Also, the changing business models in every sector will continue in this growth.

Besides, it will help in changing existing technologies to shape in a more advanced way. For example, edge computing will broaden the improvement spaces in cloud computing as many backend services for edge computing will become the research areas for cloud computing. Besides, few technologies like Fog computing, Blockchain are expected to mature more.

It is already observed that large vendors like Dell, IBM, HPE, and Intel are doubling down on the edge which is cloud-like solutions and deployable to anywhere.

“Over the next three years, buyers will shift their cloud strategies toward the edge to capture all this innovation and become more connected,” Forrester said. “While public clouds will play a part, we do not think they will dominate, as their culture is based on massive data centers and tight control of the architecture — the exact opposite of what firms need to serve customers locally.”

Key takeaways that organizations can achieve through edge computing are

• Low latency
• Resilient
• Reduced bandwidth and associated low cost
• Reduced server resources and hence the reduced cost

Trend #5 A storm of Data privacy and Cloud migration

In 2021 we have seen a perfect storm of data governance and compliance due to an increase in cloud infrastructure application amidst the Covid19 pandemic. Additionally, organizations will continue to initiate projects to ensure secure data migration to the cloud – which means encryption of all data that is required by the enterprise data governance team.

Standalone data security and governance tools finally will become an integral part of mission-critical business processes. Going forward, security, governance, and privacy will be embedded early in business processes.